Are all knitters white?  No - but you'd never guess that by flipping through most knitting books.

My friends and fellow knitters, I have gathered you here today to talk about the preponderance of white people in knitting books.  Although knitting is a lifestyle (some might say "craft") which appeals to people of all ethnicities, the models photographed for knitting books are overwhelmingly white. 

You may wonder, is it right to judge whether someone is white or non-white based solely on their appearance in a photograph?  It is not.  In fact, that's really rude.  

That being said, it's an ocean of white people out there in the photography branch of the knitting industry.

These conditions allow embarrassments like "Knitta, Please" and Ravelry's slogan, "Where my stitches at?" (what's that referencing?) to continue to exist.  Phrases that play on urban black slang, made funny because they're being said by "the opposite of that."  Like that cell phone commercial where Granny speaks text ("IDK, my BFF Rose?")

Except that the phrases are being assigned to knitters as a whole.  At which point it becomes obvious that the phrases' owners are equating "knitting" as being the opposite of "people of color."  Not to pick on Ravelry, which I think is an amazing service and I love it to bits.  But "Where my stitches at?" is only funny if you're white (and even then, just barely).  

Ravelry's pet phrase makes a lot of assumptions about its users, the people who see it when they log into the site.  Assumptions which are exclusionary at best.

If "they" think we don't notice, then they are mistaken.  I always notice, and from now on I will be including a White Folks Percentage in my reviews of knitting books.  Not to shame anyone into changing things, you understand.  Just to bring things out into the open.

Here are the percentages for the first three knitting books with models that came to hand.  (A surprising number of the knitting books I own have NO people pictured in them at all, which surprised me!)

•     Aware Knits, Vickie Howell and Adrienne Armstrong: 100% white (ouch!)
•     Loop-D-Loop, Teva Durham: 86% white (and weirdly, most of the non-white people are pictured with children, whereas none of the white people are)
•     Mason-Dixon Knitting Outside The Lines, Kay Gardiner and Ann Shayne: 73% white
•     Scarf Style, Pam Allen: 71% white.
•     Knitted Accessories, Claire Crompton: 53% white (yay!)

One of my friends is a Chinese-American knitter.  She once remarked that she had no interest in going to knitting conventions, because she felt too self-conscious being "the only non-white person in the room."  It surprised me because - being white - I had honestly never noticed that the knitting conventions I've attended were so very white.

This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; a feedback loop in which more and more people are made to feel uncomfortable thanks to the rapidly dwindling percentage of non-white attendees.  

Why so exclusionary, knitting books?  Why not include more people of color?